Music by everybody

On the heels of Joan Tower’s 70th birthday concert at Merkin Hall — where Joan presented music written by some of the musicians who’ve played her own work — comes another triumph of participation. On October 2, Bang on a Can’s office staff will offer their own performances, at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. They call their music, variously, nouveau-bluegrass, smarty-pants avant;skronk, neo-indie-classicism, baroque noir (I like that one), and boogie-down anachronism-funk, while happily telling us that “such ludicrous descriptive categories are entirely fabricated and arbitrary” (something I wish mainstream classical institutions would admit, when they’re vacantly hyping their music as “magnificent”).

Here’s their press release, as it was e-mailed to me. I might only wish that Bang on a Can itself had produced the event (though, OK, I can see how maybe they can’t take responsibility for music by people who weren’t hired for their music). Or at least they could mention it on their website.

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Greg Sandow

Though I've been known for many years as a critic, most of my work these days involves the future of classical music -- defining classical music's problems, and finding solutions for them. Read More…

About The Blog

This started as a blog about the future of classical music, my specialty for many years. And largely the blog is still about that.
But of course it gets involved with other things I do — composing music, and teaching at Juilliard (two courses, here … [Read More...]

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As a footnote to my posts on classical music publicists, and how they could do better, here's a post I did in 2005 -- wow, 11 years ago! -- about how to make press releases better. My examples may seem fanciful, but on the other hand, they're almost … [Read More...]

Here's a quick outline of what I think the future of classical music will be. Watch the blog for frequent updates!
I
Classical music is in trouble, and there are well-known reasons why. We have an aging audience, falling ticket sales, and — in part … [Read More...]

Here — to end my posts on the dates of the classical music crisis — is a detailed crisis timeline. The information in it comes from many sources, including published reports, blog comments by people who saw the crisis develop in their professional … [Read More...]

Yes, the classical music crisis, which some don't believe in, and others think has been going on forever.
This is the third post in a series. In the first, I asked, innocently enough, how long the classical music crisis (which is so widely talked … [Read More...]

Here, as promised, are the key things we need to do, if we're going to give classical music a future. When I wrote this, I was thinking of people who present classical performances. But I think it applies to all of us — for instance, to people who … [Read More...]